11 thoughts on “Wednesday Open Thread”

1. Getcher genuwine Mesa County jurnalist registration card right here, gents!

   Only news that firs our views! 
    

   The Mesa County Republican Party's 2022 platform calls for "registering and regulating" all journalists, putting electronic voting equipment in faraday cages. https://t.co/bXBElCWfQz

   — Anne Landman (@AnneLandman) March 29, 2022

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   1. That's… special.

      Do they know how anti-American that sounds?

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      1. The Trumpanzees have been heading that way for over a decade. Most people haven't been paying attention. Now the water's boiling and that frog is cooking. 

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      2. I seem to remember that 1A said something about "a well-regulated journalistia," right?

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   2. As an inquiring mind, I'd be interested if that "registering and regulating" all journalists would require something for those appearing on Fox News, too.

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2. Heckuva job, Brownie: BizWest "Judge: Marshall Fire debris litigant has no standing, no connection to Boulder County". It's paywalled, so here is the lede:

   Former Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael Brown and his group Demanding Integrity in Government Spending does not live in Boulder, cannot be harmed by government decision-making in the county, and therefore has no standing to sue the county and its elected and appointed officials in an attempt force them rebid a contract for Marshall Fire debris cleanup, a Boulder County District Court judge determined Monday, dismissing the suit.

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   1. I thought I had read somewhere about a week ago that Brown and his organization had terminated their efforts in this matter. If so then one would think the Complaint would have been withdrawn by plaintiffs obviating the need for a dismissal. Anyone know anymore about this?

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      1. From the Denver Post:

         …DIGS wants the judge to order Boulder County’s three elected commissioners and the members of the bid evaluation committee to sit for 3.5-hour depositions with DIGS’s lawyers, according to the motion.

         So, they were trying to use the Court for some political football.

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         1. This stunt has held up a lot of the excavation and debris removal in Superior and Louisville. Just because he had some half-baked idea. Thanks for fucking up things, getting in the way, and for being a general nuisance. Heckuva job Brownie!

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3. Matthew Yglesias and "Ukraine and the End of History"

   A bit long before it gets to the actual topic. It helped me understand that the path to the invasion started with Russia trying to dominate Ukraine via ethnic interests and bought politicians (Yanukovych and Paul Manafort), but moved toward military take-over as Ukrainians, including Russian-speaking Ukrainians, perceived the economic improvement in Poland, Hungary and others as they became integrated with Europe.

   So the REAL threat to Putin is EU membership.

   In February of 2013, under Yanukovych and with his allies enjoying a majority in parliament, Ukraine was poised to ratify an association agreement with the EU. Putin didn’t like that and pressured Yanukovych to make a deal with Russia instead. In November 2013 Yanukovych acquiesced, triggering massive protests and ultimately leading to the Revolution of Dignity, Putin annexing Crimea,2 and Russia sponsoring separatist rebellions in the Donbas region.

   Since then, Ukraine has become steadily less cleft.

   The pro-Russian faction lost power in 2014 when it became clear that the bar for being pro-Russian was “voluntarily abandon your best chance for economic development” rather than “have a lot of Russian-language shows on TV.” And that’s because the pro-Russian faction was ultimately controlled by Moscow and did not reflect the interests and aspirations of Russophone Ukrainians. That put the anti-Russian faction in the driver’s seat for years, but they didn’t do a great job of governing the country. That led to Zelenskyy’s landslide win in 2019, where he did much better in the eastern parts of the country than the west. Zelenskyy is a native Russian speaker, and part of his platform was to be more open to negotiating with Russia to end the conflict in Donbas.

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   1. The Ukrainians are sitting on top of some massive O&G reserves in the eastern part of the country and in the Black Sea – enough to disrupt Russia's energy influence in the EU. Guess which parts of Ukraine Putin is most insistent on acquiring from his "special operation"?

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